“hello, my computer was making a strange hissing noise last night and this morning when I turned it on there was a crackling noise and some smoke then nothing, if I bring it in can you fix it?” Eeew.

One day after posting the first beta of Safari, Dave Hyatt, author of Chimera and a member of of Apple’s Safari team posted notes that they’ve already internally fixed 96dpi rendering, CSS1 test suite compliance, low Flash frame rates, and comitted to supporting the DOM 1&2, CSS1&2 standards. This is all very good news though I’m still using the nightly builds of Chimera as my primary browser.

Even though January is only a week old, I keep thinking it should be February. I feel like I’ve already worked at least four weeks so far this year.

Because I’m behind on so many other things, updating the site isn’t the best use of my time. But lately I’ve found myself asking friends if they’ve read this or seen that, usually referring to some interesting article I found online in the moments between work and chasing Lila around. These are some of those:

• 2003 is going to be a lousy year for telephone companies.
• Lobsters outsmarting lobster traps. Lobster video.
• Lots of things I didn’t know about my neighborhood. (other NYC places)
• Cornell University’s Digital Earth interactive map maker.
• This is exactly how I feel about BBEdit
• I’m blocked in China. So’s Ben.
• NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio’s Great Zooms, seamless zoomimg MPEGs from space to the ground. (They recently added huge 1280×720 MPEG-2 files for several zooms)
• Naked Cowboy, Silver Man. Silver Man, Naked Cowboy. (fantastic photo)
• Oolong the pancake rabbit died on January 7th.
• The first escalator in Cambodia (Escalator history PDF)
• Chinese Food and New York Jews

While disagreeing with most of this New York Times editorial about the new World Trade Center plans, I realized something. Pessimists seem to be wrong more often than optimists.

Progress is not always perfect, but the very word itself implies that it is better than stasis. One of the things I love about cities, especially New York, is the accelerated chaos evident everywhere. Tiny narrow buildings squeezed between 40 story apartments, clusters of ethnic restaurants echoing past populations, rotting docks, movie theaters in old Synagogues, grocery stores in old theaters. Some places do result from grand plans, but those plans almost never align with one another and often contradict. The patchwork insanity of cities perfectly reflects the collision of individual dreams, social cooperation and a desperate grasping at immortality.

The editorial’s author, former architect now professor Witold Rybczynski, observes “Five teams proposed buildings taller than the original twin towers, in four cases taller than the 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Malaysia, currently the world’s tallest,” but seems to cast that as a bad thing. To me, that is exactly what should be happening. Dreaming big. I started saying that two days after September 11th.

Rybczynski’s criticisms seem to focus on the need for a grand plan, which seems strange coming from an urban studies scholar. The whole idea of “Bright City” planning, epitomized by Robert Moses’ massive highways and grid-busting residential sub-cities, is generally regarded as a dismal misstep which almost killed American urban life. It’s only after more than half a century of urban reclamation and unplanned repurposing that those neighborhoods have recovered.

While his own work has focused on visionary dreamers like Frederick Law Olmsted, Rybczynski seems stuck between championing the spiritual importance of buildings (especially old ones) and arguing for practical restraint. He starts out with a celebration of Architecture then shrivels into reasons why the buildings should be shorter (60 stories would barely be visible behind the World Financial Center’s 51 and 53 story towers), finally ending with a bitter, groundless appeal to consequence. One gets the sense that no matter what gets built downtown, Rybczynski is ready to pan it in the Times or the Atlantic Monthly.

Comments like these really make my day.

There are currently 7 or 8 helicopters hovering over Manhattan Bay and/or Brooklyn. This qualifies as unusual but there’s nothing on the news as of yet.

update: Maybe it has something to do with contingency ferry service?

My 80Gb drive died earlier this evening.

It’s toast. When Disk Warrior says it’s dead, it’s dead.

30gb of MP3s were on there.

I haven’t seen my CDs since February. They were never unpacked after we moved and I’m not even sure where they are right now. Not to mention probably four years of great music filched from friends, Napster and GNUtella. That was one really diverse collection.

poof.

There were likely also some old projects backed up from my previous powerbook which might not be anywhere else. Thankfully I had everything else in multiple places and the important stuff backed up.

I was planning to do a big data cleanup/consolidation next month. Of course I probably would have used that drive to do it. Actually I’m taking a sigh of relief that I didn’t get around to that, who knows how much more would have been on there.

Should I find solace in the fact that I’m not alone? Here’s another dead Western Digital 80Gb drive, and another crashed Western Digital 80Gb drive. This Amazon page has a few user reviews of dead Western Digital drives. Western Digital’s forums are also filled with complaints about Western Digital hard drives failing.

And finally, Best and Worst hard drives from the data recovery company Drive Service Company. Guess which company is the worst. If anyone is going to know which drives are horrible, it will be the people who try to recover them. I wish I’d read that sooner.

I was supposed to get some work done tonight, that didn’t happen.

Update, May 2003: I was eventually able to recover most everything on the drive through a combination of Disk Warrior, Norton Utilities, Disk First Aid and FSCK. Not fun.

Another of the Western Digital 80gb drives has failed, meaning two of three in less than 18 months.